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A collective refusal

An appeal by researchers involved in the production of knowledge on migration

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Day after day we keep receiving updates on that
uncanny war which is ongoing in the Mediterranean: updates on how many
migrants were rescued and how many have died since the beginning of
“Mare Nostrum,” the “military and humanitarian” operation that the
Italian government enlisted in the Mediterranean as a response to the
shipwreck of October 3, 2013. At that time, the island of Lampedusa was
swamped by a wave of dead bodies - of women, men, and children. We are
asked to form our opinion on Italian and European policies – those
policies made also in our name - based on the statistics of deaths.

Nothing is said, however, about the political
decisions that ground these policies. Nothing is said of the choice to
prevent people from arriving in any other way than by makeshift boats.
These are people who are fleeing the innumerable conflicts of our time,
or people who are moving because of the economic crisis, or who would
like to move simply to fulfill their desire to travel. Nothing is said,
furthermore, about the choice to consider them as subjects ‘to be saved’
at sea - the choice, thus, to turn them all into ‘castaways’ in need of
military vessels that allow them the respite of a ‘humanitarian’
survival. Nor is anything said about the decision to keep enacting the
borders of Europe at a distance - even in the current scenario of
multiple wars, many of which, moreover, directly or indirectly European -
through the tight filter of visas, which precludes travel with regular
means of transportation and forces people, instead, to embark in
journeys disseminated by a thousand obstacles. A mechanism which also
underscores labor exploitation and the ghettoization of migrants through
their ‘illegalization’. Nothing is said, yet again, of the decision to
keep the Dublin regulations in force, which designates the first country
of arrival within the EU as the one in charge of processing the claim
to asylum, bouncing people back and forth between borders, or allowing
them transit only intermittently in-between the meanders of
under-the-table agreements between neighboring countries, as has been
happening for months with Syrian and Eritrean refugees who start their
journeys towards northern Europe from Milan train station.

Certainly, the fact that Italy and the European
Union decide to manage their borders in this way seems legitimate from
the standpoint of international law. Likewise, it is legal to deploy a
military fleet equipped with the most advanced surveillance technologies
– the same used in war – in order to save those who are at the same
time forced to travel as castaways. For the European Union even
operation 'Triton' is legitimate- that operation which, starting from
the month of November, will substitute “Mare Nostrum” with the only
objective of monitoring Mediterranean waters and not necessarily to save
lives. And even an intervention such as “Mos Maiorum” is considered
legitimate, which mandates that each European-Union member state should
engage in a manhunt against “irregular” men, women and children with
the only purpose of expanding knowledge of the networks organizing these
“illegal” trips. T trips which, incidentally, are made possible by the
political decision to preserve the visa system for entry in the EU. It
is, moreover, an intervention which shows how fast the move – performed
in this case with absolute coherence and simply by a change in the
orders issued – could happen from “military and humanitarian”
operations to exclusively military and enforcement operations.

The political decisions of the European Union,
furthermore, have re-articulated colonial logics through the
externalization of borders, thus contributing to create a differential
mobility selected on the basis of capital's and individual states'
needs. Such political decisions in the last years have been redesigned
in terms of an “externalized hosting” or of "humanitarianism at
distance” for people escaping the numerous war scenarios. As researchers
involved in different fields of knowledge production on migration, we
refuse to be complicit with those policies, whose effects we see every
day: no space to exist is granted for millions of people, except a
submerged space, that can be the space of the sea, the space of the
tunnels connecting different European states, the space of the gates of
Ceuta and Melilla, or the space of the Libyan warehouses where people
are forced to stay before crossing the sea. To express our collective
refusal, we intend to share this text by reading it during university
meetings and at conferences on migration. We don’t want this text to be a
simple statement; we ask students and colleagues to sign it and
contribute to its circulation: in classes, in study places, during
lectures, at meetings, at conferences and assemblies. Moreover, we ask
that the text be circulated at universities in other European states and
even brought out of the academy in all the places and contexts where a
discourse on migration is produced today. This is a collective refusal
on the part of those who work in the university, one of the most
significant sites of this knowledge production and of complicity with
the mechanisms of confinement and with the politics of the government of
mobility.